Rants & Reviews

Current Affairs

05 May 2017

Karl Marx was born on this day in 1818 (he died March 14, 1883) and would have been 199 today. The first time I ever visited London I made a pilgrimage to his memorial grave in East Highgate Cemetery. I hated the massive head stuffed into a stone collar on a big block. Years later I recalled the distaste with which I first saw it when I was introduced to the gigantic Martin Luther King Jr statue in D.C.: both looming works seem wrong, too imperial, intimidating, missing the tone of what one feels when thinking of these historic figures.

The closest I ever got to Karl Marx came when I was working with the European Union in the 1990s when my ass might have been warming the same seat as Marx’s once did. I was being wined and dined in Brussels by a big player from Italy and a high-up official from Greece. They took me to one of the impressive historic buildings in the main square – Grand Place – of Brussels. It used to be a Guild House (like a union hall) but was now an extremely fancy restaurant, the kind with no prices on the menu. An EU expense account was going to pick up the bill, after all.

But to cut to the chase: this very venue was where Karl Marx and his patron/comrade Friedrich Engels sat down from December 1947 to January 1848 to write The Communist Manifesto, the program for the organization they belonged to – the Communist League – which had just abandoned their secret underground status for a public profile. Apparently these two guys sat at a table and drafted this famous document.

Looking back, I would’ve fit in better in the Guild House than I did in that elite restaurant, where I managed to embarrass (not really) myself and my companions. When I declined the wine – apparently a precious year/type – in favor of a Coca-Cola, my European table mates wanted to sink under the weathered floor boards. Although I was representing a British non-profit, I couldn’t argue with their mumblings of “damned American.”

24 April 2017

I finished Rebecca Skloot’s mesmerizing best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks two days ago, just in time for all the hype surrounding the HBO film of the book being shown last night. Here is imdb.com’s brief summary of the film: “An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s.”

(Practical tip: I don’t get HBO so I called Comcast. I was assured that I could sign up for HBO and cancel after one day and only pay for that day - which I have done.)

The most gripping narrative thread in the book (I listened to the audiobook in my car) is the element of forensic detective work by the tempestuous partnership between the author/narrator and Henrietta Lacks’s daughter Deborah. Together they teach themselves enough cell science to really figure out what happened to Henrietta’s cells. It is that journey of self-education, their exposure of shady ethics and insidious racism among many scientists working with the cells, the role of profit and exploitation in science, and the clarification of obfuscating scientific concepts that make the book so riveting. I thought it was fitting that HBO premiered the film (probably unwittingly) on the same day as the Science March.

It is through that journey that Rebecca and Deborah build an alliance and then a close friendship, which in turn brings Rebecca further into the Lacks family where she can both increase and share her knowledge.

HBO, however, decided to use their distinguished cast – Ophra Winfrey as Deborah, Rose Byrne as Rebecca, Courtney B. Vance, Leslie Uggams, and others in supporting roles – to focus on the human emotions by filling in so many family narrative gaps that the film seems to fictionalize a non-fiction book. Although the acting was excellent across the board, HBO chose to shortchange both the science and some of the context in favor of the drama. They did so in a superficial way, as well.

For example, Deborah’s changing moods, her jubilance and her despair, were functions (according to the book) not only of the tragedies and barriers she experienced in her life, but also of the pills she took when self-medicating. Poverty kept the Lacks family in the wretched category of the medically uninsured – despite the uncounted millions of dollars scientists and industrialists made off Henrietta’s immortal cancer cells. Even Deborah’s grandchild understood the correlation between one drug or another and the resulting mood. Another example is the absence of the back-story of Deborah's troubled brother Zakariyya (played brilliantly by Reg E. Cathey), who was brutally abused as a boy. By airbrushing the story, HBO’s film delivers a somewhat distorted and unclear emotional picture - one in which this Black family appears inexplicably dysfunctional.

My recommendation is that you read the book first – of course that is always my recommendation. Form your own sense of the key relationships and of the central themes. I’d love to hear from others who knew the book before they saw the film. Was this a somewhat missed opportunity for HBO?

23 March 2017

My friend Eleanor and I hopped into Panera, knowing we could grab a booth and a nibble for a long-awaited visit. I have a home-made button on my backpack that says “Ask Me About My Book.” It’s been there since my last book, and I never remember until some says, “So tell me about your book.” Which happens not infrequently.

It’s a low-cost marketing strategy that relieves me from approaching people and lets them ask if they’re interested. The guy behind the counter is interested and so I give him a little leaflet about Lillian in Love I keep in my bag. We get our food and settle in, when the guy comes around and says that the whole staff wants to buy a copy together – how much does it cost? He leaves and comes back with $13 and I inscribe it to the “Panera Staff.” When Eleanor goes up to order a cup of coffee, they give it to her on the house.

A minute later a young woman who works in the back comes out and says she wants to buy two copies – one for her and one for her best girlfriend. I run out to the car where I keep some in my trunk. We get to talking: she’s half Brazilian, half Dominican but says her Portuguese isn’t all that good. She says she finds the topic very interesting – and I wonder which topic she means – old lesbians? senior housing? She asks me if I’ve written other books and Eleanor mentions Lillian’s Last Affair. She wants a copy of that too. I get one out of the trunk of my car and when I return she’s got another tenner for me. We hug.

It reminds me of my friend at dance, who’s just in the midst of doing an advanced degree and who is a fantastic dancer, who astonished me one night when I had the thrill of leading her in a dance. She said that having read my book, she feels like she’s dancing with a celebrity. An actual author. I realize that not everyone hangs out, like I do, with a lot of writers. These exchanges all made me feel so good. I’m desperate to feel good because otherwise, with fascism looming, I don’t feel so hot.

21 March 2017

GET OUT is about the objectification, use, and abuse of the Black body. This is what makes it a horror film. It is also about solidarity and the crucial friendship between the protagonist Chris (played vividly by Daniel Kaluuya) and his captivating best buddy Rod William (Lil Rel Howery). Even though the two guys were rarely in the same space at the same time, TSA agent Rod was a viewer favorite. GET OUT is not, as some reviewers say, a satire about the awkward social interactions of Rose and her parents’ circle of friends when they meet her new Black boyfriend. The sustained tension of the film bears the weight of what racism feels like – not just what it looks like. Huge kudos to Jordan Peele (of the comedy duo Key & Peele) for giving us this “social thriller” (as he calls it) that he says has been living in his head since he was 13.

My thoughts:

GET OUT is the only horror film I’ve ever seen. So all the references to classic horror flicks that other friends of mine spotted in it went over my head. Nonetheless, my impression is that the horror isn’t the blood per se: it’s the racism. To me this film is about the Black experience of racism. It conveys how something that might appear to a white person as a micro-aggression, may very well have a much bigger impact on a Black person because of the context of their lives. Two hundred and fifty years of slavery were followed by the Jim Crow era, itself followed by contemporary types of institutional racism. Top this all off with a hateful President and a vicious regime. This very dangerous, very heavy reality can turn what seems like a small insult or a well-meaning asinine remark into something that feels perilous and threatening.

I understood this by thinking through the experiences behind my own fears:

Try to stick with me as I attempt to explain. The same day as I saw GET OUT, I happened to be watching a TV show called House Hunters while I was washing the dishes. It’s just one of those low-budget cable series about people looking for houses and realtors trying to meet the conflicting desires and needs of the couple/family/etc.

This episode featured a husband who, because of years of sports, had several knee operations and hated climbing stairs, so he was insisting on a ranch house. His wife said over and over to both the realtor and the husband that she had to have a two-story house because she would feel unsafe for herself and any future children sleeping on the ground floor. She repeated that she needed a staircase between herself and any potential intruder. The husband never heard what she was saying. As a big beefy white man he saw her desire for a two-story as frivolous.

But I could relate to what she was saying. I have been raped. It happened in the 60s. Not a day goes by, hardly an hour goes by, since then, that the fear of being raped again isn’t hovering close to consciousness. I relate to the house hunter’s fear of living on the ground floor. When I’ve stayed in the rural cabins of friends to write, I am afraid of the noises at night – not because it might be a bear or a wolf – but because no neighbors are close enough to hear me if I scream when some man breaks in.

Racism continues to color every experience in this country.

The house-hunting husband didn’t get it. He hasn’t experienced that kind of threat and has insufficient empathy. And too often white people don’t get the reactions of Black people to what the whites see as “compliments” or innocent “mistakes.” And not just because of slavery – which formally ended only in 1865 (just 50 years before my dad was born – not so long ago). Books have helped me understand the continuum of racism until today. When I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson, I understood for the first time how profoundly murderous the Jim Crow south was after slavery. She told of the man who was fatally tarred and feathered because he pointed out to a white shop-keeper that he had given him wrong change. How one man was mangled viciously, never to really recover, because of a false accusation that he had stolen a chicken. How surreally severe segregation became.

But although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ostensibly ended Jim Crow, in fact other kinds of institutionalized racism were developed, as I read in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This includes almost every arm of the criminal justice system, from the massive funding of the prison-industrial sector, to draconian sentencing regulations, to the use of profiling tools like “stop & frisk”.

Now we are facing an openly racist, fascist agenda by a regime unlike any we’ve seen. The unrelenting, tenacious, pernicious racism of the United States is the true horror. I’ve rarely seen a film that has made me think so hard and so long about the experience of racism, and how, within my own life as a woman, I can find connective paths to insight about the oppression of others. I am grateful to GET OUT.

12 February 2017

The writing of author and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) blew my mind when I was young and continues to strongly affect my world view in the periodic re-readings I do of his work. Most recently I revisited Another Country, an incredibly passionate novel based on his time in France that explores gay, bi, and straight sexuality with a candor that is hard to believe for 1962. But he had already published Giovanni’s Room (1956), to me one of the most elegantly written, beautiful, and courageous gay novels we have.

As a lifelong fan, I am so thrilled that filmmaker Raoul Peck was able to take the 30 pages of the unfinished book Baldwin was working on and turn it into the film I Am Not Your Negro. In the just-started book Remember This House, Baldwin wanted to give his personal perspective on the lives and the murders of three crucial black leaders, all of them dear friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

What is astonishing about I Am Not Your Negro, is that every word of the script is written or spoken by James Baldwin. Either Peck uses clips from numerous interviews and speeches, or the single cast member, Samuel L. Jackson, reads the writer’s own words with restrained power, off-camera.

We follow Baldwin’s own expanding understanding and come to understand how, at age 24, the combination of racism and homophobia drove him to live in France and how the images of a lone teenager attempting to attend a white high school drew him back to the fight in the States in 1957. We see scenes of vile racism, clips of the Civil Rights Movement, and footage of the vicious reaction of the officials and police.

There are few voices more iconic and prescient than that of James Baldwin, as the multi-award-winning I Am Not Your Negro shows us so clearly. It is a film that I most highly recommend and plan to see again. But there is a gaping hole, an elephant in the room, a strange silence about Baldwin’s own love of men. His homosexuality was so fundamental to his perceptions and his literature that it is puzzling that the film only made references once or twice that were so oblique that few would pick up on them. It is a brilliant film about a beloved historical figure, but the film remains closeted – as Baldwin refused to do.

31 January 2017

Dear people who dismiss the demonstrations as "been here, done that" and "Trump doesn't even notice or care"...

Not everyone has been here and done that. I've been on the streets several times since the inauguration (my yellow sign to the left says Jewish Lesbian Against Islamophobia - I was at the demo photo below), and I'm seeing thousands of young people who have never before had the experience of mass demonstrations. Who have never been surrounded by a sea of people who share their views. Who have never been given that sense of hope that you get when 175,000 people turn up while you were expecting 20,000 (such as Boston's Women's March). And then there are the people who may be older than young - for whom this is their first active, public political engagement.

To those who say that these executive orders are "distractions" - not the really serious issues, my favorite film reviewer and good friend Danny Miller says, "There is no order of importance to the daily horrors — ALL must be protested. The Muslim ban is as bad as it gets and must not be tolerated — how could it be seen as a distraction? That's like saying the Nazi death camps were a distraction from the occupation of France."

Quit poo-pooing these astonishing, spontaneous, street actions. They are energizing, they require a public stand, and they show others that it can be done. To all those who are tired after decades and decades of demonstrations (and in some ways I am one of them), look around. There are other generations ready and able to take the lead. And at the head of those other generations, the activists are women. From Black Lives Matter to the Women's March, the lead activists are women. At the mic and at the mic-check, the speakers are women. Quit condescending to the marches and rallies. They are a training ground for waves of fresh energy.

20 January 2017

I am lucky to be at the Creating Change Conference with 4,000 other LGBTQ activists. We are so inundated by workshops and speakers that there is no time to go on Facebook or turn on the news. Yesterday was the last day of the Obama era and today is the start of the abyss, but I am deep in this Conference of commitment, surrounded by other activists, and happily in the bubble of hope. Here’s how my first day went, starting at the end.

The National LGBTQ Task Force appears to hire staff from such a range of ethnicities and sexualities that they get most things right. They connect with multiple queer communities because they ARE multiple identities. They are not a rich white male leadership with a symbolic weak “outreach” – their staff seems to encompass the richness of this country and therefore to draw us all in. As they welcomed us to the conference at the 8:00pm plenary, they immersed us immediately in the kind of true diversity they represent. For example, we were treated to an amusing and enlightening explanation of how to be at a conference that is being simultaneously translated into Spanish and Sign.

A memorial presentation for both the victims of Orlando and others murdered by homophobia and transphobia looked at the unspeakable wounds of that violence, especially to the Latinx community, and at the ways in which people pulled together to look after each other. I wept; everyone around me wept.

The Keynote speaker Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is a commanding figure – broad, clad in purple, with a countenance both handsome and strong. He schooled us in the real meaning of the concept of intersectionality. He spoke at length and with an unflagging passion about his Southern strategy, using the amazing successes of his alliances in North Carolina as examples. He talked about how people of color, poor people, and the LGBTQ communities share the same enemies and how we are used against each other. He has always walked the walk – convincing NAACP and many Black churches to support marriage equality during that struggle. His talk was interrupted countless times as we jumped up to clap and scream, recognizing the privilege of his insights. Just one quote: “Nothing worse than being loud and wrong. Every one of our statements must have a footnote.” I was a fan before I heard him in person and now I’m a fan forever.

Most of the day had been spent at the Aging Institute – looking at the activism of older people in the LGBTQ movement. I wrote on my evaluation form: “This is clearly one of the main attractions for the older people in the LGBTQ community who come to Creating Change. It is a day that is run with impeccable skill by the charming if masterful Serena Worthington, of SAGE. The variety of voices - mainly from among Philly's elder activists - enlivens a very long day and impresses with the range of ways in which elders are organizing to change the country. Serena manages just the right mix of small groups, interactive plenaries, riveting panels, and mixed media. Elders created and hold the history of our movement and should be more widely showcased at a time when history is being turned around and our achievements are being threatened.”

I should mention that at the Elder Institute I did my first reading of my new book Lillian in Love. I’m having a “soft launch” here and will really launch it in a couple of weeks from back home. The reading was prodigious fun and people bought over half the books I brought with me to Philadelphia. This evening I have a whole workshop to myself and to Lillian in Love, where I’ll read additional excerpts.

I’m a huge admirer of the splendid organization of this gigantic conference, but I do have one beef. Here is what I wrote on the evaluation form to the organizers. “The organizers of Creating Change do an astonishingly fine job of putting together a massive conference with many dozens of conflicting demands. However, they seem to have little understanding of the needs of the movement's elders. The Institute was held in the very furthermost, the very last room down a very long hall as distant from the elevator as possible. The nearest bathrooms seemed to be nearly a mile away, quite literally, back up that long hall, and along two more very long hallways. Many of the attendees have mobility issues and the Institute had to build in longer breaks just so people could get to the bathroom with the canes, walkers, and scooters. While aging is clearly not a priority topic, one is puzzled at the ignorance of the needs of our older activists. To add to what begins to feel like an insult, the Elder Hospitality Lounge is also the very furthermost down a hall of many Hospitality Lounges that winds around the entirety of this huge hotel. What could possibly be the thinking behind these barriers to our comfort and participation? Please place us close to the elevators in coming years.”

14 December 2016

I fucked up my knee dancing. A PT misdiagnosed it and so I continued dancing. The knee locked and the pain became unbearable. An MRI showed a shredded meniscus on both sides of the knee and a bunch of unanticipated arthritis. Everyone predicted surgery, perhaps a knee replacement. My chiropractors sent me to a non-surgical orthopod with whom I’ve agreed to try a non-surgical strategy.

Here, now, is the story with emotions and characters and sham surgeries:

A few weeks ago I was dancing, as is my wont, at my favorite venue’s monthly Saturday night dance when I felt something pop and my right leg locked. I apologized to the woman I was dancing with and limped home.

The next day I went to Vermont, as scheduled, but still couldn’t unlock my leg and could barely walk. Valerie and Mark’s 4-year-old had to carry my cosmetic bag up to the bathroom so that I could basically hop up the stairs. Susan had to give me her arm when we went to the hotdog restaurant to hear Patty Carpenter make fine music.

I went to a loud Trumpy PT who insisted my problem was a tight IT Band, so I returned to my favorite dance class, after which I was in excruciating trouble. My great chiropractors identified a problem with my meniscus and gave me the name of a non-surgical orthopod at the clinic I belong to.

I had an MRI on Monday. The terrifying results arrived on Tuesday: shredded meniscus on both sides; “diffuse bone marrow edema;” fissuring of cartilage; massive swelling; very advanced arthritis – and much more. A friend who works in rehab read the report and talked of knee replacement. I live alone. I have a book coming out and a conference to attend. It’s more than bad enough I can’t dance.

Meanwhile, I had to cancel anything that involved standing or moving, including my work teaching fitness and dance to elders. My doctor suggested a cane. The nurse brought me one along with a copious sheaf of paperwork in which I had to promise to pay for it if my insurance didn’t. “But I have Medicare. Don’t they pay for canes?” She wasn’t supposed to say, but she thought not. “How much does this cane cost?” No one knows until the bill goes to insurance and is rejected and falls into my lap. “No thanks.”

Instead I bought one from Goodwill for $3.00. That evening my friend Bambi, a medical person, adjusted the cane for me and I watched YouTube videos to learn how to walk with it.

Today I met with the young, sweet non-surgical orthopod. He fulfilled my primary wish and gave me a cortisone shot (elder friends of mine call us Steroid Nation), as well as this big ole knee brace with metal hinges. He recommended a certain PT in the same building, with whom I made an appointment for next Friday.

He told me of a study in 2002 described at this link in comprehensible and fascinating language outlining the reasons many are skeptical about arthroscopic knee surgery. I’ll include a quote at the end of this blog for those who are interested.

The orthopod doctor said I should aim for 50% improvement in a month. I’ll take it! I could live with half the pain and twice the mobility, not to mention fewer pain pills. I asked him what I could or could not do and he said that obviously I cannot dance, but that otherwise to listen to my body. Right now my body is asking for yet another pain pill. Right now – besides dreaming of waking up and finding out that Bernie is president – I’m hoping that the cortisone shot is going to click in and do its job.

Thanks to everyone who has proven to really give a shit about me and my wounded knee.

“But it wasn’t until 2002 that we first had any real evidence about whether the procedure actually worked, when a novel study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. Somehow doctors convinced 180 veterans from the Houston VAMC to enter a trial wherein patients were randomized into 1 of 3 groups: arthroscopic lavage (washing the knee with at least 10 liters of fluid), lavage with arthroscopic debridement (trimming and shaving the joint), or sham surgery wherein patients were given an anesthetic and surgical incisions made through the skin without actually operating on the joint. In the latter group, surgeons called for instruments as if performing the procedure and even mimicked the lavage by splashing fluid onto the knee and floor. God bless the vets who volunteered for the trial, the doctors who enrolled them, and the hospital’s Internal Review Board that had the intellectual honesty, curiosity, and cajones to approve the study. Neither the patients nor the providers who examined them afterward knew which had received the sham or the real surgery. Patients were examined at multiple intervals for up to 2 years afterward and compared with regard to pain, mobility, and function.

“And guess what? There were no differences between the groups at any time during the follow up. The sham surgery worked just as well as the real surgery.”

19 November 2016

When we began the lesbian/gay liberation movement shortly after Stonewall, I was in it with both feet. I stomped around in my shit-kicker lace-up boots being a revolutionary dyke in the company of others like me. We had been through hell before the movement started, just for loving. I had been in love with a woman in high school and after two years of being together, we were caught, separated forever, and punished harshly.

The new concept of being “out” was one of the greatest thrills of my life and I was damned if I was going to be anything but out in my studded leather cap and jacket ala Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Those were also the early days of my training as a martial artist, and I was a bad girl on the streets. Very bad, if revengeful is bad. Those were kick-ass days indeed.

When I left the States for Israel in 1977, I suddenly had to go back into the closet. I knew how to do it having lived as a closeted lesbian from about 1963 to 1969. My youth was spent in that small dim place. I knew how to do it. I had the skills. I knew how to switch pronouns when I was being overheard on the phone. I used the closet language: “friend of Dorothy” or “part of the family.” I survived the mafia bars. I published my gay writing under a pen name when I had a job I could lose.

One of the joys of moving from Israel to England, where I lived throughout the 90s, was the ability to be 100% out there. At work, on the streets, in social settings. 100%. It was exhilarating.

So as I watch one devoted homophobe after another become part of Trump’s administration, I feel like it won’t be long before those discarded closets are going to be re-established. People may well have to be careful at work; be secretive in their houses of worship; misrepresent their relationships when they’re trying to rent an apartment. I’m not sure how safe it’s going to be to cuddle on the street or stroll along the river hand-in-hand. Kids could become an issue – getting them and keeping them.

I think of the few young gay friends I have. These folks weren’t even born when Stonewall came down. They never existed in a world where being queer meant having a mental disorder that required hideous therapies. Where you could be arrested for failing to wear three “sex appropriate” pieces of clothing. Where your sexual acts themselves were illegal.

I worry that we elders will have to run how-to workshops on self-loathing, cringing, pretending, avoiding, and self-defense. And all while the real perverts – the racist, woman-hating, queer-baiting assholes – drag this country into its darkest, dankest corner yet.

24 October 2016

I have a couple of personal memories of Tom Hayden, who has just died of heart disease at the young age of 76.

The first time we crossed paths was when he came to my apartment in Inman Square, Cambridge, to teach us the Japanese Snake Dance – must’ve been 1967 or 68. At that time I was working for the New England Resistance – a movement against the war in Viet Nam. Tom had learned this formation from leftists in Japan, who fashioned much more structured demonstrations than we ever did. It was a non-violent technique for breaking through police lines by linking arms in a certain secure way and moving forward rhythmically.

We were operating church sanctuaries for men refusing the draft because of their opposition to the disastrous war in Viet Nam. We were mobilizing people on the street. We were in constant friction with the police and needed ways to cope.

I had a kind of driveway path to my scuzzy ground-floor apartment and Tom came there to teach us the Snake Dance, which we actually used (to little effect) in subsequent confrontations with the police.

Some months later I was in California for a movement meeting. This all happened between his early 60s marriage to Sandra Cason and his 1973 marriage to Jane Fonda. Tom offered me a bedroom for a couple of days in his Berkeley commune.

There was a huge St. Bernard in that commune – I think it may have been Tom’s. I was awakened by something beating against my face. It was this dog’s dick – and it was huge. Think baseball bat. The dog was all over me, thrusting his massive cock at me – the strangest sexual assault I ever experienced. I was scared, screamed, and Tom came and took the dog out of my room.

I don’t recall much about Tom personally. But not a dog goes by that I don’t remember his beastly animal.